


Five Lies Ikol Told

by Bagheera



Category: Journey into Mystery, Marvel (Comics), Thor (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 08:00:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bagheera/pseuds/Bagheera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are as many reasons to lie as there are reasons to speak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Lies Ikol Told

**Author's Note:**

> All the section titles are quotes from "Journey into Mystery", and all of them are things Ikol has said to Loki, except "a voice, clear as a bell" - that is something Thor says about Ikol. 
> 
> Spoilers up to and including "Exiled".

1 Yes, Master

There are a hundred ways to tell a lie. Some lies are artful and elaborate, and others take only one word. Sometimes a nod or a smile suffices, and at other times there must be a thousand times thousand words, epics of vast truth to hide one little lie. But the best lies are always the ones people want to hear. The pretty, comforting ones. The ones you want to tell because everything would be so much easier if they were true. 

“You’ll tell me what I want and nothing more,” the child-god commands.

What Ikol thinks is, _Oh little one. Invite me to lie to you, why don’t you._

What he feels is a strange, unfamiliar thing, almost like pity. And that is odd, because Ikol wasn’t made to feel. He was made to remember, and this feeling isn’t something he remembers. 

What he says is, "Yes, Master."

2 A voice, clear as a bell

Fetching Thor to save the child from the demon he conjured was always a risk, but an unavoidable one. Thor is naively loyal to the boy Loki, so there is a chance that he won’t question a familiar’s loyalty. That he might believe that Loki makes friends who aren’t himself.

But Thor was never as dim as Loki wanted him to be (and never quite as clever either) and so he goes looking for Ikol when the child has been put to sleep, safe and comforted. The easiest lie to tell would be absence: if Ikol flew away now, Thor would probably forget about it. But Ikol sits on the windowsill like a statue, and Thor nods to him gravely. 

“Thank you,” he says, and then after a moment, adds, “I am glad you knew that I would come to his aid.”

Ikol says nothing. To people who aren’t Loki, his words are but the cawing of a bird, but if he wanted to, if he tried, he could speak them so Thor would understand. And Thor is staring at him now as if he desperately wants him to say something, as if he could turn him into more than a bird through sheer force of will. 

“Of all the beings in the nine realms,” Thor says haltingly, “I believe you are the closest to my brother.”

The temptation to speak is greater than ever. To ask – what do you mean? Are you really so naïve as to believe that I am a true friend to your brother, or really so wise as to recognize me? 

Thor takes a step closer. If he makes one move to touch me, I’ll peck his blue eyes out, Ikol thinks, and hops a few inches away from him, skittish as a real bird. 

“I would come to his aid always,” Thor says softly. “And not just because he is a child, and has not the magic to protect himself. All he needs to do is ask.”

Ikol stares, cocks his head, caws shrilly and without meaning. An animal noise from an animal, nothing more. Thor looks down and shakes his head with a sigh. “Nay. I will be there for him whether he asks or not.” 

He turns and leaves softly, so as not to wake the child in the next room. One part of Ikol wants to say: I don’t need you, I never needed you. Another part thinks: Why don’t you stay to watch over him, just for one night? Why leave him in my company? But the whole of him stays mute and still.

At the door, Thor glances back. The smile he gives Ikol is a dagger straight to the heart, a memory from their childhood, of mischief and secrets kept between brothers. “But thank you for asking, just this once. My brother’s death would have grieved me just as much as it did before.”

3 Your older self had more skill with women

The girl Leah reminds Ikol of her mother. Wise beyond her years, proud and willful, fiercely loyal and yet a law unto herself. Death’s handmaiden. She looked Ikol in the eyes once and asked no questions, as if his nature had been clear to her from the start. But the boy Loki sees very little of that – children are careless friends, and rarely pay attention. If Ikol was the one to make their decisions, he would court her friendship, would lavish her with attention and gifts, would do his very best to seduce her away from her mistress. If it was Ikol, she wouldn’t keep saying that she hates him. 

But Loki never asks for his advice about Leah. What he does ask, one day when he leaves one of the great feasting halls with a bleeding lip and Ikol flies down to perch on his shoulder, is, “Why did you do it?”

Ikol tilts his head. “Can’t you guess yet?”

“No, not all that.” Loki waves a hand in careless, all-encompassing gesture. “The bit where you turned into a girl. It makes for some great insults, apparently, but I don’t really see the point. Why would you want to be a girl? And not for, you know, babies. I don’t think I’ll be old enough to discuss _that_ for another thousand years, internet or no internet.”

“Why not?” For once, Ikol finds that he doesn’t have a good answer. Not even a bad one. “It was fun. Everyone was appalled, but few dared say it to my face. And you should have seen how flustered Balder was. I could hardly stop laughing.”

Loki frowns at him, and rubs his split lip. “So you weren’t actually… you used it. As a distraction. Like the bit with the horse which shall not be mentioned otherwise. It wasn’t a real thing.”

“Some things you won’t understand till you’re older,” Ikol lies wisely. Some things you won’t understand till you try them, he doesn’t say. And some things you’ll never understand at all. 

They have arrived at Leah’s cave, and Loki climbs down nimbly, and smiles as he greets her in the most annoying fashion possible. She scowls at him, then asks, “Did you fall on your face?”

The boy shrugs, well-trained in the behavior of Midgardian youths. “Oh, I just got into a fight with some dudes.”

Leah is unimpressed, and ready to be less impressed. And yet, no girl, not even her mistress, ever cared enough to ask Ikol, “About what?”

Loki touches the blood on his lip and grins. “About a girl.”

4 They were monsters

At first, Loki only watches from the sidelines while Thor, Sif and the Warrior’s Three help the mutant children rebuild the suburban area of San Francisco the Disir destroyed. There’s not much they can do to help without magic or Asgardian strength, and Loki still worries about Mephisto and Bor. Ikol doesn’t intend to comfort him, because Loki did a foolhardy thing today. 

“Two enemies for the price of one,” he says. “Not a good trade.”

“But the Disir deserved better,” Loki says doubtfully. “And wasn’t tricking Bor into lifting his own curse the best thing ever?”

What Ikol said before still holds true. The Disir were mindless monsters, flesh-eating shades of their former selves. But Loki is right, lifting their curse and tricking his own grandsire while doing so was immensely satisfying, even though he gained almost nothing, and lost much. 

“You’ll regret this,” Ikol says.

But then one of the mutant children, the Valkyrie, calls over to them, “Hey, Loki, you know what they say about idle hands?”

Loki cracks a smile and looks down at his own. Always so easy to smile, the child, when Ikol would have taken insult. Loki’s pride is exuberant, and often dangerous, but it’s never as brittle as it used to be when he was a grown man. 

“They’re the devil’s playthings,” Loki says, and yes, Ikol can see the irony, the reason to smile. He would, too, if he wasn’t a bird. 

Dani Moonstar nods and hands Loki a bucket. “You can use this to help us clear the street.”

Very few people, in their old life or the new, would ever ask the God of Mischief to pick up trash. And that’s precisely why the boy skips off with a cheerful grin to help them, all his worries forgotten. It’s a novelty, a game, and Loki loves nothing more than games. 

That leaves Ikol with the noxious puppy. No one expects them to be of any help, and they have no hands, after all, even if they are the devil’s playthings. From time to time, the one they call Warlock, the sentient machine, comes over to pet the hel-puppy and feed it scraps. 

“Monsters,” Thori growls. “Foul mutant abominations!”

“True enough,” Ikol caws softly. 

Thori cocks his ugly head, and suddenly sits down on his hindlegs, tongue lolling as he looks up at Ikol. “Birdthing,” he yips. 

“Ikol,” Ikol corrects archly. 

Thori shows an astounding number of deadly fangs in a doggy grin. “Evil Grandpa Birdthing.”

Magpies can’t sigh, so Ikol ignores the laws of nature to do just that. “I will tell you a secret now, you little flea-ridden fiend. We’re all monsters. It’s in the blood. And we’re far worse than the Disir, because they were cursed to be monsters, but we were born that way, weren’t we?”

He never loved any of his children. Or that’s what he told them and the world. They were born monsters, and deserved their monstrous fates. He gave them away, like Loki did with the rest of Thori’s litter, and never shed a tear. He never loved them as fiercely as Loki loves the little ill-born dog. 

Across the street, Loki shows something on his little Midgardian computer to two of the mutant children, and they all laugh. A little to the side, Leah tries very hard to fight an expression as she watches them. 

“The worst monsters?” Thori asks hopefully.

“The very worst,” Ikol agrees, and remembers what it was like to smile.

5 You have no one to protect you

_It had to end this way. You can’t make this many deals, you can’t sell this many pieces of your soul if you don’t have much to start with. Half of a soul at best, dirty, rotten, it’s in the blood, it will always end this way. Life’s a circle, it will always end this way. When the year is darkest, it can only get brighter, but at the brightest point, there is only darkness to come…_

“No,” Loki screams and starts from his bed. The same dream as always, a nightmare of himself. He grips his blanket tightly, panting, and makes a whimpering noise. Someone should comfort him, someone with big strong arms to hold him. But Thor isn’t here now, in the dark of the night. 

“I hate, hate, hate sleeping,” Loki whispers to himself. 

Ikol perches on a bookshelf. From there it is easy to look down on the boy, far enough so he won’t be tempted to reach out and touch him. “You are Loki. You have conquered death, why should you fear sleep?”

“Sleep makes me weak,” Loki sniffles angrily. “I can’t… I can’t stop thinking when I sleep. I’m all alone.”

“We are all alone, waking or sleeping.” Ikol lies for many reasons, but never to soften a blow.

Loki sits, hugging his legs, hiding his face against his knees. “No wonder everyone hates you,” he mumbles. 

“Quite,” Ikol agrees, and looks out of the window. It is dark, a moonless, starless, pitch-black sky. The midnight hour was always his favorite. He used to work through the night, bent over his desk by candle-light, thinking about the hours burning away till sunrise. And when the sun rose each day, in spite of the mischief Loki had worked, he went to bed with strange mix of comfort and resentment. 

The boy has fallen into fitful sleep again, curled up around himself and shivering because the blanket has slipped away from him. If Ikol had hands… but Ikol is not a man, Ikol has silent wings on which to glide, and he lands close to the boy’s head to whisper in his ear, as he was bidden to do, seasons ago. 

“No one can save you from this, little one. Not even I, for I am no one. But you are Loki, the fire that burns… and what is the one thing fire can’t burn? Do you remember? The thing that fire can’t burn is light, light and warmth, for you can’t change what you are.”

Loki stills and relaxes in his sleep. Perhaps he has remembered that he is a frost giant, and a frost giant needs not shiver, unless he believes there is a reason to fear the cold. That is the secret, the one that Ikol will never tell him while he wakes, because then it will become a truth, and all truths must be questioned. Loki is fire, and Loki is ice, Loki is the darkness, and Loki is the light.

“You can’t change what you are,” Ikol whispers, “and I see no reason why you should.”


End file.
